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Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

nytimes.com

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Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#121

Post by cjbgkagh »

pm90 wrote: post #118

Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course…

They don’t need to believe it, they just need to believe that other people will believe in it. Even CEOs can get a lot of pushback and since they’re looking to do drastic changes it helps to get as much buy in as possible.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#122

Post by acdha »

simplotek wrote: post #83
acdha wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure OCR counts as AI This is a great example of the AI effect where people would call something AI when it was a daunting research problem but give it another label once it’s working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect In this case, Apple’s modern OCR is a complex neural network system which I think most people would class as an AI tool. It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optim…

> It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents. I'm not sure I agree, primarily because "better" is subjective. A pipeline with template matching is extremely effective at extracting fixed form text in a standard layout, such as telephone numbers or credit cards, and computationally cheap as well. But I presume a drop-in black box model which isn't bound to a low computa…

I’m just going by the quality I perceive as a user. It handles basically every CAPTCHA, difficult scans of printed documents, etc. better than Tesseract. I’m sure there is lots of hard work beyond the pure ML component but from a user’s perspective it’s impressive.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#123

Post by ricardo81 »

ninethirty wrote: post #108

Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.

Always thought that social was Google's missing magic ingredient, just as much for associating content creators with identities. structured data/schema goes some way in addressing that.

They're very good at measuring the intent of the searcher, perhaps not so good at measuring the intent of why a ranking page existed in the first place.

Perhaps gets harder when more AI-like content will appear.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#124

Post by DoingIsLearning »

M4v3R wrote: post #61
lnsru wrote: post #47

Google is getting worse and worse. Today I searched for exact term “boat skipper b”. Google threw ton of trash at me. Ended looking through Bing results and found what I needed. 2/3 of my Google searches are not usable to me. Some advertisement and shady websites as results.

I recently switched to Kagi and it’s the first time I don’t want to go back to Google. And I tried many other search engines in the past, none of them stuck with me.

Indeed for technical queries it really feels like a verbatim depth crawler and really makes me feel like a search 'power-user' again.

For product search or regional results it's still not there but I specifically pay for Kagi for technical queries (after growing frustration with other engines) and I am very happy with that use-case.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#125

Post by jillesvangurp »

sorenjan wrote: post #106

What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company. In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.

My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.). All the attempts to enter new markets seem to be a succession of failures. They are still playing catchup to AWS, and lately Azure. Stadia came and went. Youtube paid accounts are nowhere close to competing with the likes of Netflix, or Spotify. They failed to compete with Whatsapp as well repeatedly as well. And now they are taking on OpenAI.

Sure Google has smart people. But it takes more than that. MS had lots of smart people under Ballmer as well. But it took Satya Nadella to sort out the mess he left behind and make that work for MS. He put an end to the Windows on anything agenda. One of the first things he did was kill Windows Phone (dead in the water at that point) and then opened up the MS ecosystem to Linux in a big way. Fast forward a few years and they've had a successful Github acquisition, most of the OSS world runs on MS Github, they've built Github co-pilot with OpenAI, you can run MS SQl Server on Linux now, .Net runs on Linux, you can run Linux on Windows really seamlessly. See a pattern here? Gates and Ballmer pulled up their nose for OSS, Nadella made MS a leader in OSS and is reaping the rewards. That's vision and leadership. At the time Google was stealing MS' thunder. Now the roles are reversed and Google needs to call in the founders to come up with a plan because of OpenAI. Which of course has deep ties with MS.

Google needs leadership and strategy. Right now it has neither. What are they going to do? Build another chat client? I think they've tried that a few dozen times already. They need a better plan than that. And I don't think Sundar Pichai is capable of coming up with that plan.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#126

Post by super256 »

blippitybleep wrote: post #117
clumsysmurf wrote: post #24

> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time…

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

> that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself

Music discovery is the best feature for me in spotify. Especially if you listen to more unpopular genres like french/german techno, old school hard trance. I found plenty of great artists there which have <5k monthly plays.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#127

Post by r2_pilot »

blippitybleep wrote: post #117
clumsysmurf wrote: post #24

> Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of primary importance. I have had an Android phone since Froyo. I liked it when the functionality was simple and didn't try to inject too much suggestions / AI. Now, Google Photos app is trying to suggest things to print, the Settings app is trying to predict when and how to charge my battery (I just want it 80%, all the time…

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

Amusingly, I find that Spotify will put B(maybe even C) songs or artists in front of me that I'd never hear on my own, but that have little moments that I enjoy experiencing, and this happens more frequently the more I use Spotify.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#128

Post by p1mrx »

ninethirty wrote: post #108

Last time this happened people thought social was the future. Facebook was considered a threat to everything since they had the social-graph, so everything had to become social. Google+, Google Buzz, Orkut.

AI scales better than social, because it works if you have no friends.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#129

Post by atombender »

college_physics wrote: post #81

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete." Transcribing this profound insight of Buckminster Fuller to the current debate: You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search. You need to create a new business model that makes the old one obsolete. Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic…

Google beat their original competitors — Altavista, Excite, Yahoo!, and so on — with an incremental improvement, not a new model. At the time (2000-2003), their search was better and faster, certainly, but not several orders of magnitude better.

In fact, Google was something of a reactionary model at the time, by rejecting the push for bloated, captive "web portals" and going back to the simpler, stripped-down user experience that Altavista had succeeded with originally.

Given how bad Google's results have become, I think you can certainly outdo it. Anecdotally, it's amazing how often I find myself reaching for ChapGPT these days to find basic facts that Google can't. I think Google is right to be afraid.

Re: Google calls in help from Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. fight

#130

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Avalaxy wrote: post #103
funstuff007 wrote: post #73

I would posit that it's more Microsoft freaking out over ChatGPT than Google. MSFT will never get that $10 billion back.

> MSFT will never get that $10 billion back Easily. By integrating it into their developer tools, office suite, Azure, Dynamics, etc. You can automate/support SO many tasks with the toolsuite that OpenAI offers. In addition to that, the way I understand it they can simply make money by licensing others to use those tools. They already started offering the OpenAI services through Azure.

I assume ChatGPT will cost around $1 per query for consumers.

That's low enough to put human copywriters out of business, but high enough that I don't ever see regular humans pay for it for day-to-day tasks.

So eventually this is some sort complex of B2B product, and that is very difficult to execute.

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